Zombie social democracy, or the ALP as Australia’s political ‘Walking Dead’

by · March 26, 2012

When watching the last few episodes of US cable TV series The Walking Dead, it struck me that the title has a double meaning, that Sheriff Rick and the other survivors of the zombie apocalypse are also among the dead who roam the planet’s surface. They’re still animated to do all the usual human things — eat, sleep, play, laugh, cry, get jealous, fight with each other, screw up — but really only kept going by the residues of the past and not any sense of a goal or a future. The edginess in the best episodes emerges from watching as human pettiness overtakes the survivors time after time, leaving them ever more vulnerable to being eaten alive; destroying each other over very little indeed.

The Australian Labor Party’s rolling crisis, playing itself out in an apocalyptic electoral drubbing in Queensland on Saturday, has many of the same features. The greater the portents of impending doom and destruction, the more the protagonists seize at irrelevancies to explain their situation and inform their actions. The ALP is fast becoming Australia’s political walking dead.

Understanding the apocalypse

The same kind of “going through the motions” that characterises the TV series infected commentary in the lead-up to Saturday: That the LNP lead would narrow, that people would wake up to Campbell Newman/Clive Palmer’s real agenda, that the distribution of votes would save Labor seats, that the settling of the federal leadership stoush would stabilise things, etc, etc. And in the short time since the result the spin to explain this historic defeat has been similarly disorienting: That it was an election purely on state issues, that when Queensland swings it swings hard, that this was simply an “it’s time” election, and that the hated privatisations weren’t the problem, it was how they were “communicated”. Perhaps worst of all is the notion that Queenslanders are mostly reactionary rednecks and deserve what they get.

A much more convincing response has been to point to Labor’s disappointing and often appalling record in government in Queensland over the past 23 years, attacking its traditional supporters among workers, the poor, women and Indigenous people. In this reading Bligh’s surprise privatisations after 2009 are both the catalyst for Labor’s unpopularity and the reason that its union base largely couldn’t be mobilised to support the government any longer.

However, the sheer depth to which Labor’s primary vote has sunk — and not just in Queensland — requires more explanation in terms of the decline of the social relevance of the party’s traditional base in the trade union bureaucracy, and the exhaustion of neoliberal managerialism as an alternative to the traditional Laborist program. This result is worse than what happened in the Great Depression or in the context of an economic crisis blamed on the Whitlam government in 1974. Yet it has happened in the absence of a recession. It’s a pretty unique moment in the last 100 years.

It was helpful, then, that Bob Hawke inadvertently deigned to give us the clearest insight into the ALP’s historic problems when last week he cheerily retold a story about meeting Japanese businesspeople in the 1980s, assuring them that his government had made sure the unions would be tame for them if they wanted to invest in Australia. Back then the union bureaucracy was instrumental in inflicting a major defeat on the confidence of workers to challenge the priorities of capital, through the Accord and its offspring. Today the unions are simply too weak to play that kind of role. In that sense, before today’s zombie social democracy, the Hawke and Keating governments were more vampire-like, sucking the working class dry for big business. All that’s left is the Twilight version of Laborism — pallid and enervated.

All this has profound implications for the federal government. The belief among some that Gillard passing legislation will win over voters is entirely misplaced. At no point was Bligh stopped from getting her agenda through parliament, but that was precisely the problem. Similarly, if it is going to be an effective manager of Australian capitalism, the ALP can hardly allow internal democracy to get in its way. And no one even dares think that the party could reverse its decades long commitment to neoliberalism so as to start to tip the balance against the “1 percent”. You can already see the silliness to which Labor hardheads descend in trying to tap into some kind of class politics with Paul Howes’ attack on mining bosses, in which he pines for “philanthropic” US billionaires like Gates and Soros to take their place. This from a union official and party operative who has distinguished himself through fealty to the bosses.

My not-very-brave prediction: For the Labor Party things will keep getting worse long before they get any better.

The Greens flatline

In this context there are a few words worth saying about the Greens’ showing. It was the party’s worst result of the three state elections since its federal arm entered into an agreement to support Gillard in 2010. The Victorian Greens primary vote at the 2006 state election was 10.0 percent, then 12.6 percent at the federal election, and 11.2 percent at the 2010 state election. The NSW Greens scored 9.0 percent at the 2007 state election, 10.2 percent federally, and 10.3 percent at the 2011 state election. The Queensland Greens, meanwhile, got 8.4 percent at the 2009 state election, then 10.9 percent at the federal election, but slumped to around 7.6 percent on Saturday. For all the confected bluster about the NSW Greens’ support for the BDS and “hard Left” image causing its “disappointing” performance last year — with more than one MP believing that “necessary soul searching” should happen via the media — it is clear that wider dynamics lie behind the pattern of votes.

A key factor for the Greens is that — whatever anti-ALP rhetoric they employ while campaigning — they also provide explicit political support to three right-wing Labor governments (in the ACT, Tasmania, and federally). During the ALP leadership crisis this went as far as Bob Brown taking sides against Rudd because Gillard was more accommodating to backroom dealing. Over the mining tax Brown’s position has essentially been to pass the tax no matter how bad it is, because it’s better than what Abbott would do, a position I understand has caused concern within the party.

Such a strategy is at one level parasitic, sapping Labor’s strength relative to the Greens. But it also limits how much the Greens can win Labor’s disaffected base (and other voters) to an independent set of politics. Those who want a political alternative to the ALP are left having to look elsewhere. For example, while the Greens at times spoke against the privatisations that were emblematic of the ALP’s failure, this was always a peripheral part of their pitch. Indeed, their economics policy carried this charming equivocation:

The Queensland Greens do not believe that governments have all the answers for tackling economic crises and value the hard work, innovation and entrepreneurship which form the foundation of a modern, liberal society with an economy which strikes the right balance between market forces and the public interest.

Labor has been the main party of the Australian Left, and almost totally dominant in electoral terms, for most of the last 110 years. That’s a reality we have to face honestly, but which we are today seeing unravel as never before. For a few years it appeared that this unraveling could be absorbed by the rapid electoral rise of the Greens. But now the Greens’ problems suggest they have are being caught up in the same political crisis.

Because the Greens have been a pole of attraction to the Left of the ALP, this is likely to have far-reaching but contradictory effects. The election result overall could cause demoralisation, but it is also likely to further break down the restraining role the official Left parties can exert on any re-emergence of social resistance, especially if Australia is hit by more serious economic problems and/or there is a further rise in employer militancy. We can see from Greece how quickly this could accelerate the decomposition of longstanding electoral configurations.

Workers’ struggle, whether narrowly economic or more explicitly political, is an essential precondition of any political alternative being built to the current mess of Left politics. But in many ways that’s a banal argument, repeated endlessly by the radical Left in stock slogans about fightbacks and union revivals, as if such phrases could resurrect a bygone era of struggle. Such an argument misses the centrality of politics, of developing “a concrete analysis of the concrete situation”. And the essential starting point for any such analysis is recognizing the historic scale and specificity of the crisis spreading through official politics like a runaway zombie plague.

Apologies to John Passant for blatant misuse of his term “zombie social democracy”.

“Workers’ struggle, whether narrowly economic or more explicitly political, is an essential precondition of any political alternative being built to the current mess of Left politics. But in many ways that’s a banal argument, repeated endlessly by the radical Left in stock slogans about fightbacks and union revivals, as if such phrases could resurrect a bygone era of struggle.”

Agree, one only has to attend May day marches to see the walking dead meandering aimlessly, zombified. Then up jumps a Labor minister or dignitary to address the dead – shouting working class slogans more apt for a bygone era. For the most disadvantaged layers in our social democratic, the bipolarities in our system of politics is mindless and incoherent – they have long given up on the workers revolution ever occurring. Ideology of any blend appears to be dead or missing in action, but it is not. Indeed it sits quietly at the very centre of this obsequious political discourse by not drawing attention to itself. The traditional parameters that defined political leanings have collapsed into each other in such profound ways that one is unable to declare issues along strictly class lines. Neo conservatism holds hands with old Left socialist ideals, the lunatic Left and the conservative Right rumps provide the side show circus but are no longer able to define the centre ring in this big top show. The Qld result is a good illustration of how inept current political analysis is in terms of understanding this new political gestalt. Antony Green’s analysis is always about precedents, he too failed to really give an ideological account for this massive shift away, not from the left, but by both sides – into the centre. A drover’s dog could have won this election with the right media exposure. This is a phenomenological political arena, one that can throw up any mix of chaotic ideological discourses, none of them defining the momment in this time or history.

“Antony Green’s analysis is always about precedents, he too failed to really give an ideological account for this massive shift away, not from the left, but by both sides – into the centre.”

I think you’re right to knock Antony Green on this count, but I see it as a massive shift away from the political class, not a shift into some “centre”. Hence outrageously big landslides but no enthusiasm for the winning side, more a case of a kind of detached process of punishment.

David Penberthy, editor-in-chief of news.com.au, has claimed that in the March 24 Queensland election ‘the Greens … vote collapsed in an unprecedented conservative whitewash’ (‘Out of this world’ Bob faces national rebuff, The Weekend [Cairns] Post, March 31, 2012).
The Greens statewide vote fell from 8.4 in the 2009 state election to 7.5 per cent this time, or by about 10 per cent. This, as Tad writes, was the Greens’ worst result of the three state elections since the 2010 federal election and its agreement with the Gillard government.
Penberthy’s estimation, however, only expresses the dream-delusion of the Murdoch media empire. The story of collapse was instead told in the ALP vote, which between the same elections fell from 42.2 per cent to 26.7 per cent, or by more than 40 per cent.
I want instead to consider two propositions put by Tad. One of these is that ‘a large chunk of the [Katter’s Australian Party’s vote came] from the ALP and not the mainstream Right parties’. The other is that the Greens’ political strategy of anti-ALP campaigning rhetoric, but explicit support for right-wing Labor governments, ‘limits how much the Greens can win Labor’s disaffected base (and other voters)’ to independent politics, with those who want a political alternative to the ALP are left having to look elsewhere, such as to the KAP, which has more clearly argued against the major parties’ neoliberal consensus.
The analysis offered here is a comparison of electorate votes. This is aided by there being only one major generally applicable change in the structure of candidates who presented in the 89 electorates: the move from three parties in the 2009 election (ALP, Greens and LNP) to four parties in the 2012 election, with the addition of the KAP in all but 13 seats.
Also, the 11.5 per cent KAP vote statewide, was highly regionalised. The five highest electorate votes – all those above 30 per cent – were all in seats within or immediately adjacent to the boundaries of the federal seat of Kennedy held by Bob Katter. The top 30 KAP seats, with votes ranging down to less than 13 per cent, were all north and west of the state’s three largest cities in the south-east (Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast), but included all the city seats in that part of the state except Gladstone (which re-elected an independent MP). On the other hand, the seats in which the KAP did not field candidates wereall in the south-east and nearly all in inner-city areas: these seats offer a basis for direct comparisons of the Greens vote between the 2009 and 2012 elections.
The swing to the LNP was less than half of the swing against the ALP. Yet most of the swing away from the ALP did go to the LNP. The KAP was winning votes from the LNP at the same time. In about 20 seats, the KAP vote was higher than the swing against the ALP, in a few seats by a factor of three or four. Furthermore, the trend in the electorate swings against the ALP varied little across the range of KAP votes, unlike the swings to and from the LNP (and, to a lesser extent, the Greens), while the swings in the ALP votes were somewhat more related to the LNP swings. Thus, it seems that, if anything, that not only did a substantial part of the KAP vote come out of previous ALP support, but this was the base of the KAP vote, with the votes of former LNP supporters the add-on element. This upholds a ‘strong’ interpretation of Tad’s proposal about the KAP vote.
Also , where there was no KAP candidates, the Greens vote tended to increase slightly. Across 12 of these seats, the average Greens vote was up by about 0.4 per cent (varying from 3.85 per cent down, where an independent candidates received a substantial vote, to 4.8 per cent up), the overall result in these seats being skewed because of the big drop in the Greens vote in Indooropilly, where the Greens had had a sitting member in 2009 (who had been elected as an ALP parliamentarian).
In the cities of northern Queensland, on the other hand, where the Greens had had above average votes in 2009, the party had some of its biggest losses. Half of the 10 largest swings against the Greens were in these five seats, where the KAP was strong, whereas the swing against the Greens in more rural seats with strong KAP votes varied substantially and the swing against the Greens tended to be less where the swing to the LNP was stronger.
Thus, the KAP appears to have won votes not only from the ALP and the LNP, but even, if strong enough, from at least a part of the Greens vote. This might involve greater Greens’ losses of a ‘protest vote’ against the two major parties, but it might also involve the party losing votes based on varieties of populist politics that it had previously won from the ALP or, to a lesser extent, the LNP. At least in Cairns, where I live, the KAP appears to have been well placed to achieve that as a genuinely populist grouping which was relatively well-organised during the campaign (better, certainly, than Greens).
The Greens’ voting base is that of a left bloc, however. That bloc is unlikely to grow much when there has been neither a rise in mass mobilisation through the labour and other social movement nor campaigning by the Greens that would increase any direct consciousness of class or other relevant interests (activity around coal seam gas among small landholders might be an exception to this).
This does not mean the Greens’ vote can’t advance instead among those influenced by populism, but that won’t necessarily be very quick and the vote won will be unstable and readily taken away by others more attuned to that form of politics.
Altogether this means that those interested in an independent politics for workers must take into account both what the Greens represent in terms of movement in that direction and the limits of that, beyond which we now must reach.

Jonathan, many thanks for that fascinating analysis. I think that’s pretty much on the mark. By detaching themselves from social movement activity the Greens have created a situation for themselves where they can occasionally snatch an unexpectedly high vote but their base becomes less stable. This is the problem in wanting to become part of the political class rather than building something socially real outside it.